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Tag: Chris Horner

On my Delingpole podcast this week we solve one of the great political mysteries of our time: how did President Donald Trump get to be so totally darned amazing on the environment, energy and ‘climate change’?

My guest Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is pretty sure he has the answer.

(Few people know more about the climate scam than Horner. He witnessed the green blob’s slimy machinations at first hand during his brief tenure as a lawyer at Enron where he was shocked to see activists from green pressure groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists round a table with oil industry representatives from BP etc, all conspiring on the Baptists and Bootleggers principle to perpetuate and exploit the great Global Warming Swindle. This was in the days of the Clinton/Gore White House: the Green Blob has been feeding on the US taxpayer for a very long time.)

So Horner – who sat on the Trump EPA transition team – has the perfect insider perspective to explain what’s going on in the White House.

Horner understands the magnitude of Trump’s achievement so far. Even Trump announcing his plan to pull out of the UN Paris climate agreement required immense determination and moral courage. After all his decision wasn’t only resisted by the usual Democrat suspects and green lobbyists: it also came up against stiff opposition from key members of the Administration, among them, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Economics Advisor Gary Cohn.

In fact, argues Horner, probably nowhere in DC is the swamp more heavily defended by the liberal politico-media establishment than the EPA and the climate change industry.

This is the phrase Shakespeare invented for “being blown up by your own bomb.” It’s also the perfect description for what has happened to one of the RICO 20 – the climate alarmist tenured professors who wrote to President Obama last year demanding that he use racketeering laws to prosecute climate “deniers.”

The RICO plan of attack was devised by the green activist Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. It has since been controversially endorsed by Attorney General Loretta Lynch who admitted earlier this week that the matter had been “discussed” by the Department of Justice and “referred to the FBI.”

But if the courtroom exchange below is anything to go by, using lawfare to harass skeptics is going to backfire horribly – and for a very simple reason. All the fraudulent and dishonest behaviour to do with “global warming” has been committed not by the skeptics but by climate alarmists.

What’s quite astonishing – not to mention squirm-inducingly embarrassing but also deliciously enjoyable in a Schadenfreude-on-steroids kind of way – is just how completely unaware of their own weakness these climate alarmists are.

Consider Specimen A. His name is Professor Edward Maibach, he runs the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University (GMU), and is the guy who actually drafted the RICO 20 letter calling for the legal pursuit of climate skeptics.

Unfortunately one of the big mistakes they made was writing the letter on GMU headed note paper rather than in a private capacity. This gave the Competitive Enterprise Institute the perfect excuse to bring a FOIA case in order to “obtain documents shedding light on how taxpayer-funded professors used their public positions and resources in this campaign.”

The result was the extremely sticky exchange below as Maibach was cross-examined by petitioners Chris Horner and Matthew Hardin, as relayed by Watts Up With That?

(If wading through the transcripts is too much just skip past and I’ll explain what’s so utterly hopeless about the Warmist position)

Q. So what you’re telling me is, while you’re not aware of the specifics of RICO and how the law works, you think that what ExxonMobil specifically was doing was troubling and you wanted that stopped?